"In the One, We Are One"

 

At his first appearance as Supreme Pontiff, our Augustinian Pope Leo XIV quoted one of Saint Augustine's more famous sayings, With you I am a Christian; for you I am a bishop. So, it should surprise no one that the new Pontiff's Coat of Arms contains an Augustinian motif: a closed book with a heart pierced by an arrow, a reference to Saint Augustine's description of his conversion experience, Vulnerasti cor meum verbo tuo (“You have pierced my heart with your Word”). Likewise, the Pope's heraldic motto, In Illo uno unum ("In the One, we are one")  is taken from Saint Augustine’s Exposition on Psalm 127, where he noted that although we Christians are many, we are one in the one Christ.

Much of the media coverage of our new Pope has, understandably, focused on popular perceptions of him and his election and interesting vignettes from his life story. Alternately, much of the media coverage has, equally understandably, emphasized the possible political implications of this new pontificate. That is all fine as far as it goes. But, of course the papacy is more than just another human interest story, and it is infinitely more than yet another player in our contentious contemporary politics.

It has often been remarked that Sunday Mass in a typical American Catholic parish may be one of the very few places remaining where different people of different ethnicities and economic classes and of different political parties and conflicting opinions still assemble together and share in a common experience. This is a most amazing and pastorally suggestive opportunity for our politically polarized and empathy-challenged society.  It is an opportunity - for which the Church is uniquely equipped - to demonstrate the unity it professes, to pour oil on the troubled waters of modern society, as Servant of God Isaac Hecker remarked to Blessed Pope Pius IX in 1857.

Politics is about the organization of our very human, very finite communal life. Inevitably, it involves disagreements - and provides mechanisms to resolve disagreements. The intensely polarized disagreements we currently experience, however, are not just the inevitable accompaniment of disagreements about finitely human practical concerns, but the result of a profoundly perverse loss of empathy, which has become increasingly common in recent years. That lack of empathy, that failure to recognize a neighbor in the other, is what so severely poisons our politics today.

In Illo uno unum ("In the One, we are one")  reminds us that all others are also neighbors. What human unity we have failed to achieve by natural means has been freely made possible for us by the grace of Christ, in whom all human divisions have become secondary.

No one who was not part of the conclave can assert with any certainty how much or how little contemporary political considerations may have contributed to the election of the 267th Pope. But, as I suggested in my first reflections upon this Pope's election, perhaps inadvertently, in electing a Pope from the U.S., the Cardinals may have have done the world and especially the U.S. an unexpected service in presenting the world with an alternative, empathetic, unifying type of American leader, different from what we have increasingly become accustomed to. 

Pope Leo XIV

 

The College of Cardinals have elected as successor of Saint Peter a Chicago-born American, Augustinian friar and missionary Bishop, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, 69, who has taken the name Pope Leo XIV.

Growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s, I received my initial religious formation from the Augustinian Friars of the Province of Saint Thomas of Villanova, who staffed the parish I lived in and who taught in my high school. That - and my longstanding intellectual interest in and devotion to the great Doctor gratiae Saint Augustine - all added to my evident excitement when his name was announced. An American Pope! An Augustinian! His Order's former Prior General and a long-time missionary Bishop in Peru!

As an American, a member of an international Religious Order, and a missionary Bishop in Peru (Bishop of Chiclayo, 2014-2023) the new Pope spans the New World and the Old World, the rich First World and the poor Global South. He is well positioned to be a unifying figure in a Church and a world which seem so destructively divided. A spiritual son of Saint Augustine, whose charism he referenced in his opening remarks from the loggia, he has also, by his choice of name, implicitly identified himself with the great 19th-century Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), the Pope of Rerum Novarum and Aeterni Patris. Our new Pope's opening address from the central loggia of Saint Peter's highlighted his commitment to the tradition of Catholic social teaching so long associated with Pope Leo XIII's response to the industrial revolution. 

Before giving his first Urbi et Orbi Blessing, our new Pope greeted the world with the greeting of the Risen Christ, Peace be with you. Prior to today, it was widely assumed that no one from the U.S. would likely be elected Pope. (His membership in an international religious order and his decades of service in Latin America obviously balance his U.S. origin.) Perhaps, however, in electing a Pope from the U.S., the Cardinals have done the world and especially the U.S. an unexpected service in offering an alternative image of American leadership. In Leo XIV, the Church and the world have someone who represents the beyond-borders global character of the Universal Church and its commitment to the poor and the marginalized. That's actually rather basic and in itself somewhat unsurprising, but it is in conspicuous contrast to so many of the values currently associated with the U.S. both domestically and on the world stage. 

Habemus Papam

 

Habemus Papam

The College of Cardinals has elected U.S.-born Augustinian Cardinal Robert Prevost, who has taken the name Pope Leo XIV

V. Let us pray for Leo XIV, our Pope.

R. May the Lord preserve him, and give him life, and make him blessed upon the

earth, and deliver him not up to the will of his enemies.

O God, shepherd and ruler of all the faithful,

look favorably on your servant Leo,

whom you have set at the head of your Church as her shepherd;

grant, we pray, that by word and example

he may be of service to those over whom he presides

so that, together with the flock entrusted to his care,

he may come to everlasting life.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Victory in Europe +80

 

80 years have passed since the original Victory-in-Europe Day celebrated Germany's "Unconditional Surrender" in 1945. As the actual events increasingly recede from living memory, the importance of remembering and commemorating them has correspondingly increased.

As on previous major anniversaries, London seems to be one of the main celebratory sites. Indeed, the UK seems to have devoted much of the week to commemorations, beginning with a military parade and a flypast over Buckingham Palace on Monday and concluding with a commemorative service in Westminster Abbey at noon London time today. That is fitting, since it is Victory in Europe that is being commemorated. For most of Europe (at least Western Europe) that also meant liberation. 

Symbolically at least, V-E Day also commemorates the beginning of the post-war European order - 80 years of relative peace and unprecedented prosperity in Western Europe. That the relationships and institutions which have historically contributed so much to maintaining that peace and producing that prosperity now seem to be in decline gives this anniversary an otherwise poignant note, as well as one of warning about what the uncertain future may hold.

V-E Day is also an appropriate occasion to remember the so-called "Greatest Generation" - those of my parents' generation (also the John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush generation) that made these 80 years of relative peace and prosperity possible. They were a unique generation, formed in Depression and tried in war, who were in many ways the last typical generation of humanity, before we Baby Boomers came along with our unprecedented experience of security, well-being, and almost unlimited possibilities. (The reality for many individuals was, of course, less unique, but the overall experience of our generation was unique and set the stage for the even less typical experiences of subsequent generations, who have inherited a world which would have been almost unrecognizable prior to V-E Day.)

So, today, we remember the greatest victory inhuman history, that concluded the most calamitous war in human history. We memorialize its many victims, both soldiers and so many more civilians. (Indeed, as Tony Judt memorably wrote in Postwar, in occupied Europe "World War Two was primarily a civilian experience.") And we especially salute the warriors who won the war, that "Greatest Generation," whom JFK in 1961 famously characterized as "a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world."

Photo: My Father's Map of his Service in Europe from June 8, 1944 through V-E Day, May 8, 1945.

Conclave (NOT the Movie)

 

Later today, the College of Cardinals will walk in solemn procession from the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace to the Sistine Chapel to begin the conclave that will elect the next successor of Saint Peter. How long it will take for them to do so, how long until we see white smoke rising from the Sistine Chapel's famous chimney, only God knows.

This is the seventh conclave in my lifetime. Most people in the world are younger than I, and most are probably less close followers of Church affairs than I am. For many, therefore, their main image of what happens in a conclave is based on the recent hit movie Conclave, based in turn on the 2016 best selling novel by Robert Harris. I personally enjoyed both the book and the movie - apart from the ridiculous surprise ending. That said, fiction is fiction. The conclave that starts today is the real thing, not a movie or novel. 

The movie is, however, a good primer on the ceremonial side of the conclave, effectively highlighting the extreme seriousness and solemnity of the process. This is, of course, in conspicuous contrast to the increasing unseriousness of almost everything in the secular world nowadays. Serious and solemn indeed is that formula each cardinal recites as he casts his vote: I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one whom I believe should be elected according to God. Solemn and serious too is the setting, the Sistine Chapel facing Michelangelo's fresco of the Last Judgment!

At the same time the movie and book do also highlight the fundamental fact that these are real people making this decision - real people who, in spite of all they have in common as faithful Catholics and Cardinals, do come into the conclave with different different personalities, backgrounds, ideas, and desires, and so may actually disagree.

That is important to remember because, although we invoke the help of the Holy Spirit - and the Cardinals themselves will very explicitly and visibly do so - still it is they, not the Holy Spirit, who will pick the Pope. As Pope Benedict XVI famously observed "there are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit would obviously have not picked. I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit's role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined."

In the end, that is an important assurance. Christ's promise to his apostles, behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age [Matthew 28:20] and to Peter in particular, upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it [Matthew 16:18], remain the assurance we rely upon in this challenging moment of transition.

Photo: White Smoke from the Sistine Chapel announcing the election of Pope Francis, March 13 2013.